ARTSBEAT; More Artists Quit Board Of Los Angeles Museum

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 17, 2012

Two additional artists have resigned from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, only a few days after the resignation of the artist John Baldessari raised new questions about the museum's direction.

In a joint letter sent to the museum Friday, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger said they were leaving the board because of their dissatisfaction with the way it conducted business and because of worries that the museum was straying from its roots as a serious art institution. ''Parties and galas are O.K., but sometimes these things called 'museums' have to have things called 'exhibitions,''' the two artists wrote. ''Our concerns are with the art, the exhibitions, and how the money that makes the exhibitions possible is gathered and distributed. Our concern is for a continued curatorial practice that is both rigorously complex and pleasurably awesome.''

Mr. Baldessari announced on Thursday that he was leaving the board, partly as a result of the resignation of Paul Schimmel, the museum's longtime chief curator and an architect of many of its most important shows. Mr. Schimmel resigned under pressure in late June after months of increasing tension with the museum's director, Jeffrey Deitch, a former New York gallery owner who took over in 2010 with a more pop-culture-oriented vision of the museum's mission and a mandate to expand its audience.

Maria Arena Bell and David G. Johnson, the board's chairwoman and chairman, issued a statement on Friday after Mr. Baldessari's resignation, saying, ''There is a paradigm shift happening today, and both art and its audience are changing.''

Mr. Deitch ''came here to bring us into this new era,'' they wrote, ''and we are 100 percent behind him and his vision for that.'' After the two new resignations, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Bell told The Los Angeles Times that they were ''very saddened by Barbara's and Cathy's decision'' and were''confident that they will remain involved in shaping the future of MoCA.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.